This story was inspired by the headstone in the cemetery in Logan next to the Utah State Family Student Housing that we walked though so many days. On the back of this particular headstone was “Kay’s Fudge” recipe. So, why not a Snickerdoodle recipe?
Emma Ray had been wandering the cemetery with a scowl on her face since shortly after they lowered her casket into the earth. Specifically, since they installed her headstone.
The front of the black marble read simply:
Emma Ray Davies
April 4, 1917 – January 27, 2000
Mother, Wife, Sister, Friend
Emma Ray had no issues with this side of the headstone. It was the back that she took issue with. On the back in carefully etched letters read “Emma Ray’s Secret Snickerdoodles”. And what followed made Emma Ray’s spirit to wander the manicured lawns and carefully pruned trees of South Hill Cemetery for more than twenty years:
1 c butter
¾ c sugar
½ c light brown sugar
1 egg
1 tbs vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cream of tartar
½ tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
2¾ c flour
Cinnamon Sugar Mixture
¼ c sugar
1 tbs cinnamon
Preheat to 325°F
Mix the butter, sugar, and brown sugar on medium until light and fluffy, 2-3 minutes.
Add egg, the yolk, vanilla, baking soda, cream of tartar, salt, and cinnamon and mix for 1 minute.
Add flour on low until just combined.
Roll 2 tbs balls in cinnamon sugar.
Bake for 12-15 minutes.
For a time she tried to ignore it. She would only look at the front of the headstone and try to focus on the “Mother, Wife, Sister, Friend” and think of those she loved and she knew loved her. But she kept coming back to “Sister” and then furor would rise and she would have to terrify a groundskeeper or petrify teenagers smoking pot in a corner of the cemetery. And when she was angry, she didn’t care that she was often visible. “Let them see me, let them know my anger!” she thought. “I will have my reckoning!”
Twenty-two long years she haunted the cemetery and terrorized visitors and employees alike. Every funeral gathering would feel a cold wind blow as her spirit swept through checking to see who was being interred. Finally, the moment she had waited for arrived: her sister, Mary, died peacefully in her sleep. The following Saturday a beautiful funeral took place at the Methodist church before the Cadillac hearse from Abbott and Abbott mortuary bore her oak and brass coffin through the wrought iron gates and into South Hill Cemetery.
Emma Ray knew immediately.
As the graveside ceremony drew to a close and the mourners dropped fistfuls of dirt on the lowered casket, Emma Ray stood patiently among the copse of birch trees. She watched as her niece, Rebecca, smiled sadly at the gravesite, climbed in the passenger seat of her car as her husband drove them away. Emma Ray looked on as the maintenance workers filled in the grave and replaced the sod on top. Finally they, too, left and in the waning afternoon light Mary Lifson’s grave sat quietly as the wind whispered the birch leaves.
Mary walked up to her grave and looked at the temporary grave marker and sighed, a million bittersweet thoughts racing through her incorporeal mind. So consumed with her melancholy that she leapt when she heard the words spoke behind her.
“Mary Elizabeth Taylor, you witch!”
Mary spun and saw Emma Ray’s ghost coming at her hands out reaching for her throat. Out of instinct she put up her hands to fend off the attacker. “Emma Ray? What are you doing?!”
“I’m going to carry you to hell myself!”
Emma Ray clawed at Mary who swatted her sister’s arms and hands away. “Why are you doing this?”
“You know, witch!”
“Stop it! Stop it!” Mary yelled as she fought off Emma Ray. She managed to put a few feet between them and they both stood panting in the growing twilight. “What has gotten into you?!”
“That!” she pointed towards her headstone.
“What?” Mary asked confused.
Emma Ray stalked over and roughly took Mary’s arm and they both appeared directly in front of Emma Ray’s headstone. “This… this… travesty!”
“Don’t you think it’s lovely?” she asked confused. “Trevor liked the black marble – said you’d picked it out yourself. And the inscription is simple, too. What’s got you upset?”
Emma Ray touched Mary’s arm again and now they stood behind the headstone staring at the recipe. “How dare you put my secret Snickerdoodle recipe on here!”
“Oh!” Mary let out a little laugh. “That? That’s what you’re upset about?”
Emma Ray fumed. Her eyes turned dark and she literally hovered off the ground.
“Okay, okay,” Mary held out her hands palms out. “Yes, I see this is what you’re upset about.”
“I’ve waited twenty-two years until you died so I could get even with you for this!”
“For putting the recipe on there?”
“First,” Emma Ray said, “This carving must have cost a fortune – probably more than the grave itself!”
“It wasn’t cheap,” Mary admitted. “But your girls thought it was a great idea.”
“Don’t you bring them into this!”
“Emma Ray,” Mary chided, “They were as much a part of the decision making here as I was.”
“Fine!” she spat. “Worst of all, you got the recipe wrong!”
“Ah,” Mary smiled.
“You left out the extra egg yolk! And ‘12-15 minutes?’ They’ll be raw or hard as a rock! 11 minutes exactly! EXACTLY! And without that extra yolk…”
“Without that extra yolk they’re not exactly your cookies,” Mary finished.
“Exactly!” Emma Ray exclaimed, then said, “Wait, what?”
Mary smiled at her sister, “Oh Emma Ray, do you think I would really get your secret Snickerdoodle recipe wrong?”
“But it’s wrong right there!”
“Yes, it is. And now when anyone takes this recipe and tries to replicate your famous secret Snickerdoodles they’re going to be close… but not exactly your Snickerdoodles!”
“I…I…” Emma Ray stammered.
“I’ve seen it, Emma Ray,” Mary said moving close to her sister and putting an arm around her. “’These are good,’ they’d say, ‘But they’re not quite Emma Ray’s. No one makes ‘em like Emma Ray made ‘em.”
Tears welled up in Emma Ray’s eyes.
Mary pulled her sister close. “And, Emma Ray, no one will. And they won’t forget it. Or you.”
